6 of the Most Memorable Fashion Heists

Remember my Spotted on the Web post about shopping sprees so wild they made history?

Well it gets better with these stories of some of the most memorable fashion heists in history. These thieves had quite fancy tastes! Adapted from Fashionologie; you can read the full thing here.

1.The Legendary Tiffany Raid

In September 1994, a group of thieves tied up the guards at the Tiffany store on New York’s Fifth Avenue and left with $1 million worth of jewelry. Instead of a smash-and-grab job, these thieves were more selective and took some 300 watches, rings, bracelets, necklaces,earrings, and other items.

2. The Cross-Dressers Who Robbed Harry Winston

In December 2008, four men — three dressed as women — buzzed the intercom of the Harry Winston store in Paris and asked to be let in. Once inside, they brandished a gun and a hand grenade and addressed some of the store’s workers by name in French, spoken with, according to The New York Times, “strong Slavic accents.”

Over the next 15 minutes, the thieves smashed into jewelry cases and loaded up their bags with $105 million worth of jewelry. Some of the haul was recovered in a 2009 police raid.

3.The Drive-In at Gucci’s London Store

A group of three thieves backed what was believed to be a stolen Mercedes-Benz through the front doors of Gucci’s store on Sloane Street in Kensington this March. The three took a sampling of the brand’s handbags and then drove off in a blue Audi A4.

4.The Hermès Flash Mob Robber

A flash mob targeted an Hermès store in Houston, Texas, in December 2011, using around 10 people to break down the door of the luxury goods outpost. Police said the thieves spent less than three minutes in the store before making off with whatever they could carry.

5.The Bergdorf Goodman Jewelry Heist

In June 2012, a trio of thieves broke into the Bergdorf Goodman store in NYC and took “at least hundreds of thousands of dollars” in fine jewelry. One thief used a hammer to break into the store’s glass door, another tried to block passersby from seeing what he was doing, and a third drove a getaway car.

6. The Marc Jacobs Sample Theft

In November 2011, the Marc Jacobs public relations team had to cancel previews of its Spring 2012 collection in London due to, as it wrote in an email to editors, “the theft of the Spring/Summer 2012 collections during its transfer from Paris.”

The entire collection totaled 46 looks that hadn’t yet gone into production, and the company offered a reward for information about its whereabouts. Luckily, the missing samples were duplicates of the original collection shown in New York.

But just two weeks later, more of Jacobs’s designs went missing when a team of masked gunmen stole around $400,000 worth of Louis Vuitton merchandise that was being shipped through Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.